Jim Harbaugh starts to build on Bill Walsh legacy

Coaching football is similar to constructing a house. You start with a foundation and build on it.

Notwithstanding Stanford’s loss to Oregon on Saturday, it’s been fascinating to watch two Bay Area teams, assembled by the same man, reach for the apex of the sport. It’s also fascinating to look back and see who helped build the House of Harbaugh.

The similarities between the San Francisco 49ers and Stanford Cardinal are unmistakable. Both teams employ a highly sophisticated offense, built on power running, innovative sets and opportunistic passing. And both teams feature a strong defense, albeit stronger in San Francisco than in Palo Alto due to personnel issues.

Behind both teams is the hand of Jim Harbaugh, a football lifer whose coaching foundation was influenced by some of the biggest names in the game.

It all started with Harbaugh’s father, Jack, a lifelong coach who bounced around the high schools and colleges of the Midwest during Jim’s formative years. When it was time for Jim to play college ball, it was off to Ann Arbor and the tutelage of Bo Schembechler. In the NFL, Harbaugh played for the likes of Mike Ditka, Ted Marchibroda and Lindy Infante. When he was done playing, Harbaugh set down roots in the Bay Area, where he learned from the region’s two gridiron greats, Al Davis and Bill Walsh.

By any measure, that’s an impressive list of mentors. And one can see a little bit of each in the final product. Any time Harbaugh espouses his team-first virtues – he declined an interview for this column on those grounds – one can hear the voice of Schembechler. And whenever the 49ers or Cardinal put a big lineman in the offensive backfield, one can’t help but think of Ditka and his battering ram, William “The Refrigerator” Perry. Davis’ fierce individuality is evident in each and every interview Harbaugh gives.

‘The Genius’

But it’s Walsh’s influence that is most interesting to Bay Area fans. Harbaugh famously sought counsel from the coach known simply as “The Genius” while Walsh was wrapping up his career down on the Farm.

John McVay, Walsh’s primary collaborator in building the 49ers’ dynasty of the ’80s and ’90s, has a unique perspective on such relationships. This is a man who played football at Massillon High in Ohio, where Paul Brown began his legendary career. He played football at Miami of Ohio for the great Woody Hayes and Ara Parseghian, alongside teammates like Schembechler and Bill Arnsparger. And he remembers talking to Walsh about a young coach named Harbaugh who used to come by his office at Stanford to talk football.

“He was very upbeat on Jim,” said McVay, who refers to himself as the 49ers’ No. 1 fan these days. “Walsh would be in his office at Stanford and Jim would come in, sit on the floor with his back against the wall, and they’d talk.”

“My sense of it was that Bill thought he had spotted a good one.”

If anyone would know, it was Walsh. Decades before, Walsh had sat at the feet of Paul Brown, who brought the young offensive innovator in to guide the nascent Cincinnati Bengals’ attack. Over eight seasons with the Bengals, Walsh helped mold a young Ken Anderson into one of the league’s most efficient passers. One can draw parallels to Harbaugh’s role with Alex Smith this season. He also used that time to take what Brown taught him and formulate his own philosophies on what became the West Coast offense.

Walsh also drew organizational inspiration from Brown, who not only pioneered the forward pass with the Cleveland Browns, but also was the first to break down film, call plays for his quarterback and hire a year-round staff of assistants. He invented the draw play and the facemask, and used his offensive guards to shuttle plays in and out. To say the least, he was an innovator. Later, it was Walsh who took on the mantle of chief innovator, scripting the first 20 plays of a game plan, transforming the hiring and evaluation process of players and coaches into a science, and creating a whole new way of moving the football down the field.

In a foreword to George Cantor‘s book “Paul Brown: The Man Who Invented Modern Football,” Walsh wrote, “It’s no exaggeration to say that he is the father of the modern game of football. He changed the game. His approach to coaching, the degree of organization, his dealings with his players – all of them were masterful.”

“He was probably the greatest teacher the game has ever seen.”

In his book, “The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty,” David Harris wrote, “Bill relied mostly on what he had learned under Paul Brown and, to a lesser degree, what he’d picked up from Al Davis, but much of what he did was simply his homegrown vision of how things ought to be.”

‘His own man’

And so it is with young coach Harbaugh. He has gleaned much from his mentors, but has moved forward with his own stamp. As McVay puts it, “He’s his own man.”

In a pass-happy sport, Harbaugh has tweaked the West Coast offense to feature power running first. He is employing three-tight-end sets, complicated motion schemes and the jumbo package (featuring an extra lineman to shore up the run-blocking scheme). There are times when he has no wide receivers on the field. His nose tackle caught a pass for 19 yards two Sundays ago. And he seems to have figured out the proper way to travel back east without tiring out the team. Somewhere, Paul Brown and Bill Walsh are smiling. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who has introduced more innovation to offensive football in the past few years.

“When you have exposures like Jim has had, to the people he’s had, a little bit rubs off and all of that goes together and makes your own DNA as a coach,” said McVay, who coached the University of Dayton and the New York Giants during his career on the sidelines. “The last thing a coach wants to do is make himself in the image of whoever. You have to be yourself.

“I’m sure his dad and Schembechler and Bill and all the others had a big influence on him. That makes him what he is.”

It would be foolhardy to make any real comparison between Harbaugh and his predecessors. All of the coaches discussed above won championships and endured over a long period of time. The 49ers’ coach is just starting to build his legacy.

But it would be a mistake to discount the knowledge he has gained from a truly unique string of mentors.

Jim Harbaugh is the chief architect of two successful football programs in one region, an accomplishment unseen since Paul Brown himself coached Ohio State to a national championship and then guided the Cleveland Browns to an unprecedented string of success in the pro game.

Whether Harbaugh can continue to build remains to be seen, but the foundation is solid.